“You want fries with that?” or why new business doesn’t always mean new clients
When I picture the search for new business, I am immediately drawn to a particular scene from the movie “The Fugitive.” In our scenario, of course, Tommy Lee Jones is no longer Deputy Marshall Samuel Gerard, but a hard-driving sales manager sending his crack sales team out to corral that elusive high-dollar client.
And while new business is regularly found that way, don’t discount the value of simply picking up the phone, dialing a current client, and asking “Hey, what’s up?”
Why do this? Because if you’ve worked with a client before, you may assume that they know everything you offer and will be dying to call you when they have another need. But that’s not always the case — particularly if they originally came to you for a specific type of project (print, outdoor, etc.)
We learned this the hard way. We’ve had several clients that we worked with on multiple print projects that had no idea we did website design and online marketing. That’s a failure on our part.
One simple way to combat this is to employ one of the most clichéd retail tricks out there: “You want fries with that?” In this case, you may be quoting a simple ad or a high-dollar brochure, but if your account executives are trained to drop a throwaway “Oh, by the way, we do XYZ thing, too” line at the end of every meeting, you might be surprised how often existing clients can generate new business.